Today you had me excavate your nose, which you’d put corn into. When Ruth was a young girl, her father filled a notebook with her precocities: This generational power shift is made explicit by “Today” observations that father and daughter write for each other. Somebody should come up with a word for that.Īs her father recedes into a childlike puerility, Ruth gains maturity. By caring for her father and confronting his mortality and his problematic past, Ruth finally attains adulthood.Īt 30 years old, Ruth might seem a bit long in the tooth to be the protagonist in this kind of novel, but a combination of increased life expectancy and affluence has resulted in a new stage of American life that falls between adolescence and adulthood. Though the staccato structure of the narrative is ultra-contemporary, the plot is timeless: the coming-of-age story. The narrative, and its narrator, are in limbo, neither here nor there, neither now nor then, neither girl nor woman.

The use of three separate verb conjugations to describe one single incident creates a nebulous now that isn’t quite in the present, but not quite in the past, either. “Every day, we lose one hundred thousand brain cells.” I’ve read this in the Los Angeles Times. “Could this be true?” I’ve called Grooms, and I’m asking. This is a novel of millennials, for millennials, and by a millennial, so naturally there are no chapters, but rather brief, diary-like entries, like so: Still reeling from the gutless way her fiancé broke up with her, she has quit her job to move back in with her parents and help care for her father, Howard, who has recently been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

Ruth Young, the aptly named narrator of Goodbye, Vitamin, Rachel Khong’s debut novel, returns home on Christmas Eve, but not just for the holidays.

Goodbye vitamin book